The Goshawk by T.H. White

to seed, slept in a Welsh peace, dreaming perhaps of Owen Glendower. Chub Wheeler by the Black Pit slumbered deeply, guarded by slumbering dogs. The moon lay calm on the ruffled water. A nocturnal motor bicycle, probably a Silston poacher bent on some lawless errand miles away, just muttered in the silence as the breeze dropped. Standing in the thick grass, with slow heart beats soothed by the still night, I thoughtfully broke wind. The horns of elfland faintly blowing.
    When we went indoors again to the aladdin light Gos began to bate. His feet, which had been cold outside, grew hot again, and the hand stroking his soft breast feathers found them damply warm. His mutes still dropped on the tiled floor, green and constipated — was it the craye? I sat on the rep sofa, holding him ticking and cheeping on the left hand, while I wrote on my knee with the right. He would beat my head with his wings as he bated. The wrist watch on the right hand ticked. Cheep, tick, and scratch of pen-nib in the crepitating solitude: they slithered like cockroaches over the drum of silence, while down my spinal column the life deeply hummed like a tide. It thundered in far surf on distant breakers, or, like a buried dynamo, droned out its power: used up its steady strength: slowly by wear and tear lowered its efficiency: would eventually run down.
    At dawn we went out into the dew, to drink a glass of beer to the sun. The divine majesty, Mithras no longer worshipped, rose with the morning wind, tinting the under sides of dove-grey clouds with other pigeon tints. An owl cried himself away to bed, making Gos look up for a sight of his cousin. The first wood pigeon began his timeless admonition, Take Two Cows Taffy, and a cow heavily breathed.
    Now another colour entered the extraordinary pattern. The tense equilibrium and poised mania of delighted solitude would grow thirsty, as it were, after a week or two, for human company: and then nothing would serve but the celebration of drink — not the evening hours with the gentle philosophy of malmsey or madeira, but the gullet-widening carousal of beer among loquacious comradeships, the noise, the rattle, the circular stains, the tock of darts, the smiling faces. For a long time I had not been what one could call an abstemious man.
    It was working in my veins now, unsuspected, alongside of Gos. For him, the necessity was a long walk on the fist; as it always was. The chief weapon in training a short-winged hawk was continuous carriage. But for the carrier it became a question of destination; walking all day, one said to oneself: ‘Where shall we go now?’ Long before six o’clock we had reached the county boundary.
    Timmy Stokes, the Buckinghamshire roadman, had cut right up to the end of his beat. The grass stood short and trim, the drains carefully spaded out. Northampton, to be noted with local pride, was neglected and wild. Standing there, in the morning happiness, with a saffron sky in the east and the moon in the south-west still lemon yellow, beside a field where the harvest had already begun, one saw in the mind’s eye the imaginary lines all over England: the roads coming up macadamized to the invisible threads, and going on as stone, the ditches suddenly changing from cut to uncut, the parishes and territories and neighbours’ landmarks: all slept at peace now, all this beautiful achievement of co-operation and forethought among our fathers who were at peace also, in dust. The meadowsweet in my buttonhole diffused its scent piercingly on the early wind.
    As I walked home in the evening it was melted together: the public house five miles away, where I had arrived long before anybody woke up: the hawk chastened and feeding well, even in the bar parlour among curious men: the anxiety and scenes on meeting traffic for the first time; the healthier mutes: the beer slow and swelling in the throat: the warm hearts: the hard body wending its indirect courses: the meadow-sweet